Press Release for Wednesday, April 26, 2017

History Professor Receives Prestigious National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship

Bossy Only
Scholar in the Nation Working with Present-Day Yamasee Indians

Dr.
Denise Bossy, a University of North Florida associate professor of history, was
awarded a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship to support
significant research in the humanities and to further her research of the
Yamasee Indians, a community that is hardly understood by scholars today.

In its
last five rounds, the NEH fellowships program, on average, received over 1,200
applications per year and awarded just 80 fellowships each year—meaning only
seven percent of all applicants received NEH funding.

“Dr. Bossy’s trail-blazing work explores the history of the
Yamasee Indians and the strategies they used to survive amidst European
colonialism and American expansion. I’m convinced that she will write an
impressive book on the Yamasees, one that will challenge the way we think about
this supposedly extinct group of Indians, and the Indians of the Southeast in
general,” said Dr. Charles Closmann, chair of the Department of History at UNF.

Bossy,
the only scholar in the country working with present-day Yamasee communities,
received over $50,000 for the year-long fellowship to study the history of the
Yamasee Indians, who lived in Florida and other parts
of the South. The Yamasees had communities on Amelia Island, St. Augustine and
along the banks of the Oklevueha River, but they’ve been erased from Florida's
history.

“My study will not only
recover Yamasee history but also expand currentunderstanding of American Indian strategies for
protecting their communities,” said Bossy. “Though scholars recognize
migration, factionalism and ethnic diversity as central to the ethnogenesis of
Southeastern Indian communities, only a few studies have considered how select
Indian communities maintained their identities as they attached themselves to
more powerful Indian polities.”

With the Fellowship, Bossy has already started
her research at archives around Florida and South Carolina as well as the
Library of Congress and Smithsonian in Washington D.C., where she’s consulting
accounts of the Seminole Wars and Seminole Removals, the Dawes Rolls and other
census data, BIA records and ethnographic studies of the Seminoles and
Miccosukees with whom the Yamasees lived for much of the 20th century.
She has also spent time working with the Oklevueha Yamasees, who have long kept
their own collection of family papers and genealogical records.​​

A trained
ethnohistorian of Southeastern Indians, Bossy is
currently writing a monograph tentatively
titled, “A History of the Yamasee Indians: Ethnogenesis, Strategic Diaspora,
and Resurgence,” the first book on the history of this important Southeastern
Indian community.

Scouring
Spanish, British and American archival records, Bossy has begun to put the
pieces of their history back together. “It's hard work, because the Yamasees
responded to the chaos wrought by European colonialism and American
expansionism from the 17th to the 19th centuries by moving,” she
said.

When the very existence of their communities was threatened by
enslavement, pirate attacks, pressures to convert to Catholicism (or
Anglicanism) or wars by British and then American colonizers who wanted their
lands, the Yamasees would relocate. Gathering their communities together,
they moved to a safer place where there were better economic and political
opportunities.

Like the Yuchis, the
Yamasees lived alongside the Creeks and, like the Shawnees, the Yamasees used
movement as a political strategy, but there the comparisons largely end, says
Bossy. Because mobility lay at the very heart of their ethnogenesis as a
people, the Yamasees were able to sustain long-distance kinship networks across
the South.

Through
these deliberate migrations, the Yamasees made much of the Southeast their
homelands, from Florida to Georgia to South Carolina and back. Though
scholars have long believed that the Yamasees were extinct by 1763, Bossy's
work reveals that they survived well into the 19th and 20th
centuries—in fact, there are descendant communities in the South today. Over the past two
years, Bossy has made strong connections with the chiefs and matriarchs of the
Yamasees in Florida and South Carolina.

She received her doctorate and master’s degrees in American history from
Yale University and her associate’s degree in history from Princeton, joining
the faculty at UNF in 2007. Bossy has held fellowships and grants from the NEH,
American Historical Association, American Philosophical Society, Mellon
Foundation, John Carter Brown Library and three institutes at Yale University.
Her research regularly takes her to archives across the South and Great
Britain.

Created in
1965 as an independent federal agency, the NEH supports research and learning
in history, literature, philosophy and other areas of the humanities by funding
selected peer-reviewed proposals from around the nation. Additional information
about the NEH and its grant program can be found at www.neh.gov.

UNF, a nationally ranked university located on
an environmentally beautiful campus, offers students who are dedicated to
enriching the lives of others the opportunity to build their own futures
through a well-rounded education.